How Marketing Automation Can Aid Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the hottest topics within business to business (B2B) marketing today and can be made easier with automation. Creating content involves coming up with new content ideas, creating the content, distributing the content, and tracking its impact to your bottom line. Many of these steps are made easier with marketing automation, helping marketers show the value of content marketing in new ways that weren’t possible before.

The real-time insights such as which content is being read by whom, and how it is influencing people’s buying cycles, are insights that can be obtained only when a marketer has a marketing automation tool that can look at each person and his or her engagement with content.

The visibility that marketing automation gives a marketer helps remove the guesswork from content creation. Marketing automation also is a single tool that helps people create and publish these content campaigns.

Publishing your content is another time-consuming part of content marketing that marketing automation makes easier. Publishing content through email, blog posts, webinars, and nurturing campaigns all becomes easier when you can use a single tool rather than have to combine multiple tools to execute your content campaigns.

Marketing automation allows marketers to create cross-channel, fully tracked, content-promotion campaigns in a single step, saving a lot of time trying to connect disparate channels and tools. You can more easily publish content with deeper insights that provide marketers with better feedback than ever before on their campaigns.

The feedback obtained is then used to help refine and curate as well as to prove the value of the content marketing campaigns. Return on investment (ROI) reporting allows a marketer to tie revenue back to the content that either influenced or generated the revenue directly. Marketers can therefore prove the value of their more resource-heavy campaigns.

Trying to ask for a budget for a new piece of content is difficult. It is hard to justify paying a speaker $15,000 for a webinar if you cannot track sales associated with the webinar.

Likewise, it’s hard to justify creating a $10,000 ebook if you can’t prove that it will deliver sufficient closed business. Using marketing automation in conjunction with your content strategy will make justifying future content efforts easier, as well.

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